Cellular communication systems have become commonplace and are used by a large majority of people for person-to-person communication. Moreover, with the increasing use of smartphones, digitally distributed content is more and more consumed on wireless terminals. While the delivery of a large part of such content, e.g. web content, needs to be directly controllable by the user, the delivery of media content, such as video, can in many cases be shared by several users.
In order to increase efficiency of shared media consumption, point-to-multipoint systems such as broadcasting and/or multicasting can be used. In this way, network resources are shared between receiving wireless terminals to a higher degree. A set of related standards for point-to-multipoint content delivery using cellular communication systems is 3GPP MBMS (3rd Generation Partnership Project—Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) and 3GPP eMBMS (evolved MBMS).
However, the scheduling and planning of eMBMS sessions becomes very complex. A cellular communication system can have thousands of radio base stations, whereby capacity checking based on checking each radio base station is very time consuming, and can amount to more than fifteen minutes for one multimedia session at the time of filing this patent application. Moreover, the service operation department and the RAN (Radio Access Network) operation department belong to different organisational units, whereby information is not easily shared on a detailed level. When multivendor deployments are used, the problem of capacity checking is only aggravated.